Thursday 25th July, 2013

Sorrento Retreat Day 7: The goal, if there is one, is out of sight. I see no thing, nor do I intuit where it is leading me. I am in the darkest dark I have known. Not a dark humour but a darkness of clarity. To arrive at a goal I do not see is to shoot arrows blindly into the dark and pray they find their target without killing someone accidently in the process. Focus and careful aim – like Luke with the blast shield down. The Cloud says to shoot arrows of love, but now with the yew -wood strength and flexibility of the longbow. Heavy of heart yet not adrift, I hear the yeoman being encouraged to stretch further, bend all the way back, you will not break. Sometimes the tree looks dead, but it still grows inside. When it is ready it bursts out of its old skin. Ask for help with becoming more flexible. Then bigger risks can be taken.
God is the goal. Ask God to bend you and deliver you to your goal.

Adapted from 2 Corinthians 4:7-15I am only an earthenware jar that holds this treasure, to make it clear that such an overwhelming power comes from God and not from me.
I am in difficulties on all sides, but never cornered;
I see no answers, but don’t despair;
I have been alienated, but never deserted;
always, wherever I may be, I carry with me in my body the life and death of Jesus.

All this is for your benefit, so that the more grace is multiplied,
the more thanksgiving there will be, to the glory of God.

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Under-cover agent:

Horatio Caine formerly worked in New York City as a detective with the NYPD, before moving to Miami where he worked first as a detective, and then as a Lieutenant, with the MDPD. It was there that he killed the man who murdered his mother: his own father. In 1995, while on the job, he was stabbed while investigating a case in which children were locked in closets while their parents were murdered. The perpetrator, Walter Resden, harboured a deep grudge against Caine, collecting the blood from the stabbing and preserving it for 10 years in order to frame him for the murder of Horatio’s girlfriend, Rachel Turner.

Horatio is Hamlet’s most trusted friend, to whom Hamlet reveals all his plans. Horatio swears himself to secrecy about the ghost and Hamlet’s pretence of madness, and conspires with Hamlet to prove Claudius’s guilt in the mousetrap play. He is the first to know of Hamlet’s return from England, and is with him when he learns of Ophelia’s death. At the end of the play, Horatio proposes to finish off the poisoned drink which was intended for Hamlet, saying that he is ‘more an antique Roman than a Dane’, but the dying prince implores Horatio not to drink from the cup and bids his friend to live and help put things right in Denmark; “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, / Absent thee from felicity a while, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story.” Hamlet, speaking of death as “felicity”, commands Horatio to wait “a while” to tell the story; perhaps Hamlet dies expecting his friend to follow as soon as the complete story has been told. Hamlet’s last request creates a parallel between the name Horatio and the Latin orator, meaning “speaker”.